It may, indeed, be desirable to guard against a misconception, by the express admission that there is some necessary ambiguity in the terms employed. We may seem to have unduly extended both the verbal meaning, and the sphere of importance, of 'evidence' and 'proof.' Undoubtedly there is a sense in which it would be, not merely true to admit, but important to insist, that in the acceptance of religious truth, Faith neither is, nor ever can be, displaced, in order that Demonstration may be enthroned in her place. But then Demonstration is a word which belongs to strictly logical nomenclature. And the very point here insisted on is that the strictly logical presentment of religion is, in reference to the real presentment of religion, most inadequate. Undoubtedly, if everything else is shorn away, and religion remains solely and only in the form of strict logic, without sentiment, without imagination, without experience of duty, or sin, or right, or aspiration, or anything else which belongs to the spiritual consciousness of human personalities, the logic of it is, and must be, imperfectly conclusive. Now words such as 'evidence,' 'proof,' 'intelligence,' are no doubt often used in connection with processes of the intellect taken apart--the intellect of a being merely rational. In insisting, therefore, that the word evidence, when used in reference to religious subject-matter, must include data which, to the observer of physical phenomena, would seem vague and impalpable; and that intelligence, as adequately trained to apprehend and give judgment upon religious evidence, is in some respects other, and more, than that intelligence which can deal with evidence into which no element of spiritual consciousness enters; we differ, perhaps, at the most, more in form than reality, from those who simply deprecate the appeal to 'evidence' or 'proof' in matters of faith. To the religious man, then, the fulness of Christian evidence is as many-sided as human life. There is historical evidence,--itself of at least a dozen different kinds,--literary evidence, metaphysical evidence, moral evidence, evidence of sorrow and joy, of goodness and of evil, of sin and of pardon, of despair and of hope, of life and of death; evidence which defies enumerating; into this the whole gradual life of the Christian grows; and there is no part nor element of life which does not to him perpetually elucidate and confirm the knowledge which has been given him. Everything that is or has been, every consciousness, every possibility, even every doubt or wavering, becomes to the Christian a part of the certainty--an element in the absorbing reality--of his Creed. But this is rather the end than the beginning. Certainly it is not thus that the Creed of the Church can present itself to those whose life is still independent of the Creed.